NYC Winter Jazzfest (Friday and Saturday) A strategic overload of jazz and improvised music, now into its 11th year, the Winter Jazzfest subsumes a pocket of Greenwich Village, with shows running simultaneously at 10 spaces, involving hundreds of musicians. It’s impossible to absorb in toto, but among the many highlights are Trio 3 (Oliver Lake, Reggie Workman, Andrew Cyrille) with the pianist Vijay Iyer, on Friday at 10 p.m. at the Minetta Lane Theater, 18 Minetta Lane; a series of “Improvised Round Robin Duets,” Friday after midnight at Subculture, 45 Bleecker Street, near Lafayette Street; the David Murray Infinity Quartet with Saul Williams, on Saturday at 9 p.m. at Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, near Thompson Street; and the Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet on Saturday at 9:15 p.m. at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square Park South. The schedule is at winterjazzfest.com. (Chinen)

Sun Ra was a big-band innovator, a pioneer of recording and playing with electronics, a poet, a cosmic philosopher, a bandleader and a keyboard innovator who claimed to be from Saturn. Herman Poole Blount would have turned 100 in 2014 had he not left us more than 20 years ago. But his spirit lives on, and so does his long-running band.

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Thursday, January 15th, 2015 · 7:30PM · red fish blue fish, directed by Steven Schick
This critically-acclaimed San Diego-based ensemble performs, records and premieres works from the last 85 years of western percussion’s rich history. Fifteen years ago, Professor Steve Schick started the group at UCSD. He is currently the Music Director of the La Jolla Symphony and Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. In a delightful coincidence, he was also the very first artist presented by Fresh Sound in 1997. The New York Times calls red fish blue fish a “dynamic percussion ensemble from the University of California.” The group works regularly with living composers from every continent. This evening the rfbf performers will be Steve Solook, Christopher Clarino, Dustin Donahue, Fiona Digney, Leah Bowden, and Ryan Nestor.

Friday, February 6th, 2015 · 7:30PM · Ross Karre
Ross Karre’s program, “Opera with Objects,” is comprised of several works from the last 50 years involving objects as phenomenological inquiry, as whimsy, as vessel, and as a means of containing (or liberating) larger worlds of perception. With works from figureheads like Alvin Lucier and Vinko Globokar alongside brand new works by Fritz Hauser, Mark Applebaum, and Natacha Diels, this performance presents a continuous intermedial tour of a variety of interactions with found objects.

Wednesday, February 18th, 2015 · 7:30PM · Jean-Charles François Trio
PFL Traject
The improbable meeting of three musicians – Pascal Pariaud, Jean-Charles François, Gilles Laval is at the origin of the creation of the group PFL Traject (in 2006). The terms of “traveling,” of “trajectory,” in their plural dimensions are the constituent elements that best define PFL Traject, concerning as much the history of each individual member as what determines the collective improvised playing. The members of the group all went through very different journeys.

Friday, March 20th, 2015 · 7:30PM · Aiyun Huang and Eric Derr
Percussionists Aiyun Huang (Montreal) and Eric Derr (Philadelphia) join forces on the Fresh Sound Music series to present exciting new ideas and pieces stemming from their unique approaches to their instrument. Aiyun will be playing a theatrical program featuring “Cooking with Aiyun” by Canadian composer Peter Hatch. This piece combines Aiyun’s two passions of music and cooking, inspired by lives of Gertrude Stein and Julia Child. Aiyun holds a DMA degree from the UC San Diego, studying with Schick, and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto. Eric will perform new compositions for drum set. From the swirling marbles of Carolyn Chen’s “Great Birnam Wood” to relentless intensity of Patrick Hart’s “700 Club”, Eric is exploring new directions with the instrument that got him into music in the first place. Derr is a percussionist, new music advocate and passionate educator living in Philadelphia. He holds a DMA in Contemporary Music Performance from UC San Diego, where he studied closely with Steven Schick.

Thursday, April 9th, 2015 · 7:30PM · Brian Archinal
Currently based in Basel, Switzerland, Archinal is engaged in the most current and critical streams of modern music performance, conceptual performance practices, as well as the possibilities of multimedia in the current artistic culture. He is a recording artist with documents on MODE Records, Ensemble Works, and GOD Recordings. Since his Studies at the University of Kentucky (Professor Jim Campbell), University of California San Diego (Professor Steven Schick), and his Swiss government funded studies at the Musik Akademie Basel (Professor Christian Dierstein), he has been collecting awards and praise for his musical and artistic activities.

Friday, May 1st, 2015 · 7:30PM · Kjell Nordeson
Equally conversant in notated music and jazz improvisation, Norderson divides his time between Stockholm and San Diego. Nordeson is a well-known figure in the improvisational world with multiple recordings in groups led by figures such as Ken Vandermark, Larry Ochs, and Jon Raskin as well as the Clean Feed-Records group Angles. For Fresh Sound he will present Walking with Mirabeau, a concert trusting the process of the music unfolding while playing. At certain points during an hour of mainly improvised music, he will arrive at Rebonds b by Iannis Xenakis, Omar II by Franco Donatoni, and Prelude in Eb minor (Well-Tempered Clavier, book I) by J.S. Bach. These pieces will be surrounded by improvisations and recorded material, like islands in an improvisatory stream.